Type Subsidiary Products Wi-Fi chipset Headquarters Taiwan Parent organization MediaTek | Industry Semiconductor Website none Founded January 2001 | |
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Ralink technology corporation ceatec japan 2008
Ralink Technology, Corp. was a Wi-Fi chipset manufacturer mainly known for their IEEE 802.11 (Wireless LAN) chipsets. Ralink was founded in 2001 in Cupertino, California, then moved its headquarters to Hsinchu, Taiwan. On May 5, 2011 Ralink was bought by the Taiwanese company MediaTek. RaLink (and its RT line of wifi products) should not to be confused with Realtek, a manufacturer network communications products (including a RTL series of wifi ICs) that is also based in Taiwan.
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Some of Ralink's 802.11n RT2800 chipsets have been accepted into the Wi-Fi Alliance 802.11n draft 2.0 core technology testbed. They have also been selected in the Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS) and Wireless Multimedia Extensions Power Save (WMM-PS) testbeds. Ralink was a participant in the Wi-Fi Alliance and the IEEE 802.11 standards committees.
Ralink chipsets are used in various consumer-grade routers made by Gigabyte Technology, Linksys, D-Link, Asus and Belkin, as well as Wi-Fi adaptors for USB, PCI, ExpressCard, PC Cards and PCI Express interfaces. An example of an adapter is the Nintendo Wi-Fi USB Connector which uses the Ralink's RT2570 chipset to allow Nintendo DSs and Wiis to connect to the Internet via a home computer.
Ralink technology corporation ceatec japan 2008
Operating systems support
Ralink provides some documentation without a non-disclosure agreement. This includes datasheets of their PCI and PCIe chipsets, but for now does not include documentation of their system on a chip used in Wireless routers.
Linux
Drivers for MediaTek Ralink wireless network interface controllers were mainlined into the Linux kernel version 2.6.24. (See Comparison of open-source wireless drivers.) Ralink provides GNU General Public License-licensed (GPL) drivers for the Linux kernel. While Linux drivers for the older RT2500 chipsets are no longer updated by Ralink, these are now being maintained by Serialmonkey's rt2x00 project. Current Ralink chipsets require a firmware to be loaded. Ralink allows the use and redistribution of the firmwares, but does not allow their modification.
In February 2011 Greg Kroah-Hartman praised Ralink for their change in attitude towards the Linux kernel developer community: